Digital Asia Series talk with Dr. Rajesh Veeraraghavan
Digital Asia Series
April 4, 2023
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Location
Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W Harrison Street, Suite 153, Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal File
Patching Development
Information Politics and Social Change in India.
By Rajesh Veeraraghavan
How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms? Through an ethnography from the commanding heights of the bureaucracy to the front lines of the village, from sophisticated software to grassroots social audits, Patching Development shows us how the National Rural Employment Guarantee program (NREGA) in Andhra Pradesh, India, has confronted the infamous problems of the last mile. "Patching development" is a top-down, fine-grained, iterative socio-technical innovation that makes local information about implementation visible through technology and enlists from marginalized citizens through social audits. These processes are neither neat nor orderly and have led to a contentious sphere where the exercise of power over documents, institutions, and technology is intricate, fluid, and highly situated.
The book won the Honorable Mentions for the 2023 SPAR Book Award organized by the American Society for Public Administration and from the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Development's Book Award, 2022.
Rajesh Veeraraghavan is currently an assistant professor in the Science Technology and International Affairs (STIA) Program at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He seeks to
engage in critique both through a sociological lens as well as constructive design using data and communicative technologies. More at www.rajeshveera.org
Date posted
Dec 13, 2022
Date updated
Mar 2, 2023